Jira email notifications: Where is the law & order?

What is one of the biggest annoyances during a workday? Either not getting a super important email or getting an overwhelming amount of spam.

Imagine sitting in your office - or during these truly crazy times, in your home - trying to get into your workflow. You know the feeling, right? When everything falls into its place, and you don’t even notice how the hours fly by? Now imagine this but with 1000 unnecessary email notifications per day.

A study by Thomas Jackson et al. showed that the interruption of an email is as severe as phone calls. We have the urge to answer almost immediately - just like a phone call.

Email is regarded as essential when it comes to communication and coordination of team members. What else is crucial for these exact reasons? Jira. When working on a project, you’re probably in a team, which means many changes in the issues and boards during the process. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Jira has to alert every single user added. If the project members are drowning in notifications, then there is a high chance that they won’t notice the ones important to them.

What is a Jira notification exactly? When an event occurs while using a Jira service, the system notifies the users affected. When any change/update happens to the issue (created, updated, assigned, resolved, closed, commented, etc.), it triggers Jira to send out some type of notification.

This blog post will help you navigate Jira’s email notification management and show you how to simplify the process via Jira Email This Issue notification plugin. Are you a “learning from a video” type of guy/gal? Check our Youtube video about Jira Notifications here.

Notification types: How can I get information about my issues?

In therapy. Just kidding.

Jira supports a variety of notifications other than email: you can create push notifications to your cell phone, plus you can always integrate Jira service with other software, e.g., here is how to connect Jira Cloud and Slack with the help of the Jira Cloud app. There are available plugins to create Jira Desktop notifications too.

And there are, of course, the good old email notifications.

There are three types of issue notifications via email in Jira: batched, separate and other.

Batched came to life intending to reduce the number of emails, creating a summary of changes that occur close together. Batching is the default on Jira Cloud, but you can turn it on and off on Jira Server (by going to System > Batch notifications, at first, it will be on).

If you would like Jira to send a separate email for every issue update, turn off the Batch notifications on Jira Server.

You will get the “other” type of email when the notification is not related to an issue update.

Scheming – but in a good way

Throughout the lifecycle of an issue, a handful of events could happen to them, and it’s always important to alert the impacted users. Atlassian’s Jira provides a notification scheme that associates particular events with the proper email addresses. The preset notification scheme called “Default Notification Scheme” is added to every single new project, but you can always customize it.

How to customize the Jira email notification scheme

When a problem occurs concerning email notifications from Jira, you have to investigate whether it’s a personal problem or it affects all of the added users. You can set global rules, but every team member can set their preferences. In the following segment, We will walk you through how to fine-tune your notification scheme. Keep in mind that more than one project may use that particular email notification scheme!

If you are logged in as a Jira admin with global permissions

Do you want to change the Default Notification Scheme? Go ahead and create a new one!

• Go to Settings > Issues > Notification Schemes
• On the subsequent page, you can edit/delete the already existing email notification schemes, and you can create new ones for your needs!
• If you click on “Notifications”, you can associate certain issue events with certain recipients.
• You can add the new email notification scheme to a project by going to Settings > Projects, then select the desired project, then pick Project settings > Notifications, then click the Actions dropdown menu and choose “Use a different scheme”. Select the already made notification scheme and click the associate button on the following page.
• To help out the Jira admins, you can choose between “Company managed” and “Team managed” when setting up a new project on the latest Jira Cloud version. If you choose the first one, you can change the notification scheme the way I explained above.

• You can edit the project’s current notification scheme by going to Project settings > Notifications. There is a custom field to set the email address where the emails are sent.
• If the “Team managed” option was chosen when setting up the project, you can change here the notification scheme without hurting any other project’s scheme.

• You may filter who are the recipients of a certain event-triggered email notification.

If you want to change the notifications to your preferences, but are not logged in as a Jira admin

• Select Your Profile > Personal settings

• Go ahead and scroll down!
• “Watch your issues”: If you would like to get a notification of any changes regarding every issue you ever interacted with, click “Enable” here.
• “Email notification for issue activity”: If you don’t want to be sent any emails about the issue activity, then select “Don’t send me email notifications”. If you want emails but want to customize them, then pick the right filter for you.

Email This Issue VS Notification Assistant

A well-configured Jira notification plugin/automation can change your life! It saves you time, which means it saves you money. Jira is awesome for communicating and collaborating inside the team, but what about the customers or someone outside of Jira? We will show you two at first sight similar-looking add-ons – both are available on the Atlassian Marketplace - but you will see how different they really are. The most significant contrast is that Jira Email This Issue offers a complete email management solution, while Notification Assistant lets you send beautiful event-triggered emails. Both of them allow you to send emails to external and internal users. But Email This Issue for Jira is more than that. Here you can check out how it offers more than Jira.

Some of the best features of Email This Issue:

• Send emails from a workflow transition: you can save time by sending automatic replies to the incoming emails. They can be fully customized, and you can set up JQL filters to send them out conditionally.
• Customized email notifications: when sending out an email (especially to an external user) it’s key to personalize it. For example, the “from email address” and the sender’s name is generated from the custom fields.

• Searchable audit log of emails sent or received: logging is not only extremely important when it comes to bug reports, but it’s also a huge help to systemize email activity.

If you have any questions about Email This Issue for Jira check out this FAQ and don’t hesitate to contact us!